Olena Kalytiak Davis

Journal, Day Five

he day everybody (everybody? anybody?) ‘s been waiting for: and on the fifth day they had
SEX!

you wanna know what i’m wearing?

well, first there was the inky cloak,
then i changed into my antic disposition: my doublet all unbraced, my stockings fouled, ungart’red and down-gyved to my ankles,
and then, of course, my traveler’s sea gown, scarfed about me.
and now…

now i’m wearing nothing

but the art between us

and long underwear and jeans and wilco t-shirt and hoodie and puffy parka and pink-yellow-blue woolen cap and handmade muffler and mittens and big boots. (and dark circles under my eyes) (this blog and the eye cream are not doing dick!)
hey, it’s alaska!
and you try paying for the heat on a blogger’s salary. (this ain’t no poetry magazine!)

so, yes, you gotta create your own.

so, did you see my poems in tin house?

if not, here you go, and i don’t know if this violates any copyright shit so go buy the magazine for winnie the pooh’s and poetry’s (and fiction’s and essay’s) sake! (but this time in their proper order, with the revision that they asked me to make, but forgot to include, and without the typo.) (nothing against tin house!!!!!!!!!!)( i love tin house and it’s inhabitants!) (and hey, what’s a little misreading?????) (and what’s a little allusion?) (a lot!):

FRANCESCA SAYS MORE

that maiden thump was book on floor, but
does it really matter who kissed who
first or then who decided to go further?
lower? faster? naturally, we took
turns on top. now here, now there, and up
and down…once it started no one even thought to think to stop.
so, we have holes inside our souls,
but mustn’t we begin by filling others’?
god gave us lips and hands and parts
that cannot possibly be saved for prayer. nor by.
i will not name name, claim fame by how well
or who i fucked or why, it happens all the time.
and it’s you, white pilgrim, whom next galehot seeks.

fuck. we didn’t read again for weeks.

(AND MORE)

(o (l)uxu/orious (p)/(l)ussuria) one can rule
rimini and still not rule (or rim) me. doric, ionic,
phallic: i liked it all. i moaned and wept as i do now,
but it was a joy and a different kind of sorrow:
to see your lover’s eyes when he’s down there. down there
the very root was the very root, and fig was fruit and nut
gelato. down here how it happened can still make me shudder.
sigh.
just how far down, sinner, must you go? whatever pleases you:
follow my tail, my thigh. and: VIDE FICA MIA. eat my furbellowed
heart, tremble at my furbo and my body gone but still beautiful
heart, this life that’s for the birds is saved by rhyming such as our
heart, if you twist my arm just right i’ll loose my mind.

the new style is the old style: from behind.

FRANCESCA SAYS TOO MUCH

each day i came an infinity of times; it rained and reign
was so complete with every pleasure as if in love i sang.
pity you’re confused: ’twasn’t love. it was sex that dissolved me:
limo was body and mud. and long and shiny
and briny what i polished with my tongue marmo hard and pallina
smooth once whetted i never stopped saying sipa, was always in
position, in the mood, too much was never enough. i kept open
my arms my legs my eyes my lips moving lifted to heaven
my ass my hips. pilgrim, can you picture it? my tits. and it was
all wet. don’t cry. dry your ablutionary tears. no thing now can absolve me:
but i regret it not: i was so alive! o, to again have
someone’s occhi and fingers and penes on in me, to be
licked and sucked and eaten and fucked and debauched.

sigh and sign and eye hungry pilgrim, if only you could have watched.

FRANCESCA CAN TOO STOP THINKING ABOUT SEX, REFLECT UPON HER POSITION IN POETRY, WRITE A REAL SONNET.

pilgrim, i did not mean to be so loose
of tongue, so bold in all i loosely told
in my smut so smug, so overly sold.
i did not mean, pligrim, to traduce.

i apologize, i offer no excuse:
but, poet, though you have right to scold
it was highsouled you who made my mouth hold
what it held and tell what it told. a truce,

no, let’s call it an honor. mine is apt,
as far as long sentences go: my vice
in your verse will tempt others to try

and sing: readers, lovers forever rapt
and about to sweetly sigh: paradise!
thank you, poet, for keeping me alive.

ANY QUESTIONS NOW, PILGRIM?

(pilgrim, that’s no way to comment.)

funny, almost just like m.w.’s just as i wrote this insider-sent richard jones poem puts it: (finishing up the great corman/insidercomment/life/art/SEX strand/strain/stain) (insert something from lowell here!) (ha ha ha)…

And the Word

I find things inside books
borrowed from the library -
foreign post cards, rose petals,
opera tickets, laundry lists,
and, once, a bloody piece of cloth.
Today, inside a volume
of Cid Corman’s elegant poetry,
a snapshot -
a man in a dark nightclub
embracing a red-haired stripper.
The man grabs the woman
brashly about her waist,
displaying her nakedness
to the camera. The flash
illumines the man’s flushed face,
his single-minded lust
as he bends to touch
his tongue to her nipple,
while she, arching her back,
coolly turns to the camera,
her face flooded with light,
as if asking, “So,
what do you think
about the book you’re reading
now?”

or, FINALLY, and really REALLY finishing up (pun kinda sorta intended) :

as my old old old old friend m.f. used to say back in the seventies when we were like 13 or something and he was wearing his “i just laid my honey” yellow (not elephant but bee) (looked more like a wasp) t-shirt:

let us know/ our indiscretion(s) sometimes serve us well…

or was it:

it was real
and it was nice
but it wasn’t really nice!

ciao, o.

02.03.06 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Journal, Day Four

all this thinking is not giving me a chance to think!

things to consider doing (in) here:

make corrections: add k.w. to mix list, nirvana unplugged.
clarify, i.e. say something, um, coherent about the living a different life thing.
more lowell letter stuff: jarell in a taxi, historians learning by writing. x being “almost as bad as being a poet, life for it’s possessor, but something too real and occupying to be exactly desired.”
idea for poem: PLEASE LET ME EXPLAIN THIS POEM
make poetry mix
enough already: (when i was driving the deleted contents of yesterday’s ur-blog gingerly through anchorage i kept thinking, relax, it’s all in your head you thought it all thru already by writing it and it will be easy to get it back and down. not at all true. the most interesting/subtle thinking was and, duh, always is, in the writing itself, not in anything i could ever re-think-cover myself in a car.)

and outside the blog:

i.s writes: You both give the reader, the friend, the blog, the unmediated you and the willful theater of the unmediated you. They’re not separate people, they’re entangled, the poet you and the person public-private you. Working out which is which, how they’re inextricably liked, is what (each in our own way) we poets always do.

i love how that linked became liked! (but now that i reread it doesn’t that mean by each other? by selfsame? ) cause, yes, i worry (so insecure!) about my friends not liking me after reading the stupid blog!

fear of orphic sparagmos!

i.s.: the anxiety of influenza

is it the “writing” that makes me do it? because it’s “writing” some dumb need to inhabit it fully?

and another thing about personal correspondence: who writes in their “writing style” and who does not.

and i will also tell you a secret i tell everyone (really?): allen grossman’s tapes called “poetry, an introduction” that he made for the teaching company a while back (he’s kidding in the title) is truly the most amazing reading of poetry (i mean, both a loud and exegesis) that i have ever heard. unfortunately, have never heard him live. he and jeff tweedy both blew me off when i asked them to contribute to this issue of alaska quarterly review i just edited.

and continuing with the poetry readings/putting the poets on a plane thing: i wrote w.c. back saying the only great reading i had ever heard in my real life was belle waring in a trance one afternoon in florida like 12 or 13 years ago.

and w.c. just now back:

O, have been trying to think of any reading I’ve been to that actually did it for me. Oh! Shit! My god, this is lengthy but worth it: when I was a kid (16 yrs old) I was in a band with my best friend and we got picked to be in this insane end of the year cabaret-type thing–best ‘out there’ (name of monthly series) acts in Mpls/St. Paul (and our pictures were in the paper because we were the youngest ever, and we were two little dudes playing guitar and drums and weird jazz fusion things we wrote ourselves). Anyway. At the one we were in, one of the acts was this guy and girl taking turns reading a poem that interwove with itself. It was about: love and also: sadness. As the poem got further in/on (best line ever, which I of course remember: “How many ways can you spell loneliness? Six. Seven counting your name”), while the guy was standing there next to the girl as she was reading (and they were both wearing like really ‘nice’ dress-up clothes, nothing sexy, just solid) HE WOULD PLUCK AND EAT PETALS FROM A TULIP THAT HE WAS HOLDING. Fuck, haven’t thought of that in years.

which, after another freak, is a great lead in to the nontrans(or a)ggressive thursday reader’s digest children’s portion of my blog:

somewhere during kate’s and michael’s blog someone talked about dean saying he didn’t write better poems then his classmates in kindergarten and gradeschool and highschool, he just kept writing them. this reminded me of the really good beginning of this article vivian gornick wrote on mary wollstonecraft in the nation a while ago (same issue where camille paglia’s break blow burn was reviewed, cause that’s why someone gave it to me). (no comment.) gornick: “many, if not most children exhibit an early talent for art or science, even intellection; but we can never accurately predict the one whose youthful giftedness will blossom not into a pastime but into a driving need: the kind that determines the course of one’s life…in creative work, the driving need occurs when the talent is exercised, the possessor of it finds that she or he is struck to the heart (not a thing that happens simply because one has talent) and a sense of expressive existence flares into bright life. that experience is incomparable. it induces a conviction of inner clarity that quickly becomes the very thing one can no longer do without. if it can be done without, it usually is…It is to this clarity of inner being that the radical–like the artist, the scientist, the philosopher–becomes attached, even addicted.”

my kids, avgustyn 6 (augie, gobi, gogobee, goose, deck) and olyana 41/2 (lyana, lyalya, lyalyabee, little bean, lulu, lyali, lollipop) yes, hi! i really am a mother, (and/but/so IS NOTHING SACRED TO YOU? IS EVERYTHING BLOGABLE????) are still in that first amazing stage. olyana recently drew this picture of a caterpillar (drinking wine she said, but it looks like smoking a bowl) and sitting (with his pizza she said but it looks like a remote control) watching a lady and her penguin (looks pretty much like a lady and her penguin) on tv and not hearing that his friends, a butterfly and a beetle (who kinda looks like a spider), are knocking on his door! lovely green polka dot rug underneath it all.

she can also recite to be or not to be (she puts on satin slippers for the delivery) all the way to perchance to dream, while changing the first letter of every word to “p”. how great is that?

and today: so, the parasaurolophus was doing her blog and she heard someone scream!

my son, wept, (wept!), the first time he heard neil young’s “four strong winds”. “if the good times are all gone then i’ll be moving on….” need i say more?

no, but i will:

we were just discussing noah and his arc and augie was floored that everyone else except noah and those specific pairs of animals was fucked. (glad about the sea creatures, though, his old favorites.) finally after thinking about the whole goddam disaster he said: “you know, god is just like winnie the pooh, sometimes he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

and finally, i’ve been recently experiencing my year of horrible aging (it’s a real phrase in french, does anyone know it?) (said the blogger to the void) and so i got, you guessed it: eye cream. my daughter was, like, what are you doing?????? the first time she saw me putting it on. i’m, like, oh this is so you don’t look old. the second time she stood there watching and after i was finished she said: “mama, you still look old!”

so, anyway, i have kids.

they, too, like music (most recently johnny cash: “i’m going to jackson.” “mama, why are they going to jackson?”) way more than poetry, o.

p.s. netflix queue:

1. scenes from a marriage
2. the beat my heart skipped
3. mysterious skin
4. the holy girl
5. kings and queens
6. saraband
7. junebug
8. nobody knows
9. gunner palace
10. head-on (but i now think i already saw this. thought it was good.)

there should be some cassavetes on there, whom i love and haven’t watched in a while. a new bio of him was just reviewed by philip lopate in the nytbr. of course: during his lifetime his work was often dismissed as confused and self-indulgent. and did you know pauline kael hated him cause she felt his movies showed contempt for the audience’s desire to be entertained?

p.p.s. yes, it’s as hokey as i get:

IN PRAISE OF MY CHILDREN

i sing my children’s’ lovely dirty blonde heads
i sing their hands, their fingers, their widely spaced teeth
i sing their limber limbs, their fish white rumps

i sing their complicated lives
i sing their simple feet:

once a pants a time
my grandpa had a tree
and ants ate out its heart

i sing their knowledge of marine mammals
i sing their knowledge of the dinosaur and bat
i sing of their enlightenment; of their having lighted on
the spider and the many eyed fly

the wings of nymphs and butterflies
the mating of the octopi

i sing their love of sugar
and, of love

glory be for the ability to laugh and one second later cry
glory be to those that hate and love their brother
want to pinch and poke him in the eye
glory be to those that suffer their sister

i praise their sorrys, their beg-a-pardons, their ‘kooz me, ‘lank you
and their mama, please
i praise their growing slowly up
and their lying reluctantly down…
their imitation of sleep:

ah speepy speepy speepy
ah speepy speepy speepy….

somebody take that apple off my son’s head
the arrow from my daughter’s bow

o alate, though their shoulders bare be
o fucked up, though without a fucking care

02.02.06 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Journal, Day Three

well, here we go again.

no, i. here i go again. you, reader, are really not helping at all!

this is the second time i’m writing this same/unsame insane entry. such large discourse—gone! if you didn’t read my comment and i’m assuming by your silence, reader, that you didn’t, i wrote this installment already once today and then for some sick reason pressed “don’t save”. yeah, let’s not get into issues of technology or stupidity or fate or self-sabotage and/or should one try to re-cover what one has done and lost, or accept that it is gone and go elsewhere, further? faster? (remind me to talk about my poems in tin house), cause i guess i’m just gonna do some of both.

well, no, let’s: i’m calling this one: BLOGGING OUTSIDE THE BLOG.
(who’s been reading too much hamlet?)

(and let me tell you, it really is a learning startling semi-harrying experience to be asked to daily narrate the contents of your head into the void yet with a cutoff. i know i do this, i mean, write poems, and i know there are more and less controlled ways to do this, i mean, write a blog (see yesterday’s entry), but to do this conscientiously, or really stream of conscious(ness)ly, it’s a lot. i don’t keep a journal, and i usually think i think, well, not (that) much. but our minds really do work and hard and all over the %^^$# place!)

(what would happen if i really was forced to write poems as a paid job, with real rent deadlines?)

(and what if i really really said what i think!!!!!!!!!)

(oh and yeah, how could i forget o’hara? sometimes i think that writing a poem (read: blog) is such a moral crisis i get completely sick of the entire situation!!!!)

which brings me to another aside: insider comments. i mean i’ve been getting them (amazingly, people i didn’t tell about the blog have found it) and thinking how we condemn yet so love all our layers of exclusivity. or, atleast, i do. tell me poetry for poets is not of our own making!

did i tell you i’ve been reading lowell’s letters? i mean i did, but then i pressed don’t save….

me: “man, i have to start from scratch!”
my daughter: “mama, what’s scratch?”

what is scratch? and isn’t this what we always really want to happen: for things to break down so we can break them down? further? lower? faster? (remind me to talk about my poems in tin house.)

and isn’t that what this blog is? we want the letters of…and the journals of…. and the interview with…why? lowell writes to pound re the cantos: “nothing new i’ve read so breaks through the crust of its making”. yes, breaking thru the crust of its making: from inside or out. we do love meta-text, don’t we? but do we really want to remove the art out from between us? no. and really isn’t it just wanting more of what we always already want in/from the work/art/text. it’s not starfucking, not about these or any particular people, it’s wanting to know what we ask from the their work, too, i.e. about ourselves and each other, right? some of these people just happen to be extraordinarily articulate and smart in all their voicings. (insert complete letters of keats and dickinson here.)

well, i wanted to (and did) talk/write/think more about “misreading” and about the incredible density of……(pressing DON’T SAVE)…..allusions and then on to music, as promised.

it went something like this, (but, yeah, way better):

lately, i’ve been noticing/thinking about how my e-mail correspondents (my by far most prevalent form of human commerce/communion/communication) (unless you count my kids)

(look mama, wanna see me draw with my eyes closed?)

is rife/ripe with misinterpretation. the things people want clarified! the things we are confused by! our insecurities! (and it’s funny how it is different for fiction writers and poets.) (and yes, most of my correspondents are writers.) anyway, what i am trying to (re)say: with interpretation problems on/at this level (and i’m not even going to begin talking about the “misreadings” that have seriously affected the non-art course of my life, if such a thing exists. the one thing i am prepared to say at the confessional thing is that i really do believe that writing ( both in what maybe can be called a confessional style and/or not/another) makes you live a different kind of life.). once again: with interpretation problems on/at this level why do we go around pretending we know what each other’s poems are doing/saying? i mean, tell me you know what the fuck stevens is talking about! and i don’t mean sufjan. (i said: we’ll get to the music in a minute!)

(mama, captain crunch and fruit loops do taste good together!)

so i have these francesca poems in tin house.
nah, let’s save that for friday.

but i am gonna bring in cid corman again! what? yes, from that same interview. talk about misreading/overreading/overreaching, somebody mentions corman and i go crazy. metamisreading: are we choosing the right texts to misread in the first place?

I had been reading a lot of Chinese poetry, because my mentor was Chinese, and he introduced me to a lot of Chinese poetry. I wanted to translate with him but he said “No,” because you can’t do it: Chinese poetry cannot be translated – the ancient work. And he said, “The allusions in Chinese poetry are so deep,” and we don’t even know what is being alluded to 90% of the time, because the old poetry is lost. They were referring to other poetry; and we don’t know what that poetry was. So it’s impossible: there are so many levels in the Chinese poems—the great ones, of course—that it’s impossible. And of course I wanted to translate the best. But I said to him, “You know, other people have translated the stuff anyway; maybe we can do better.” He wouldn’t buy that. So we never did translate much together.

(mama, who wants a tooth brush? who wants a tooth brush? )

and my thinking that we don’t get 90% of the allusions of anything much less ancient chinese poetry! and that writing/reading poetry is the great fuckyouish ability to proceed with and despite that fact.

(mama, do you know who saved the parasaurolophus? this guy: the butterfly!)

breaking thru the crust of the making:
and i know that doesn’t necessarily mean endlessly belaboring the making…
but i personally have this inability to fake it. if i’m doing something over i have to allude to the first making, and any unmaking.

(so, as i was saying in my ur-blog day three….)

and, mostly so far i’ve found this principle most troubling re poetry readings. i.e. doing the same thing over and pretending you haven’t/aren’t. ( i do know the poems are supposed to be able to take it.) i’ve always wanted to ask musicians about this, and maybe/i guess i have, but they usually say: what?

just kidding.

MUSIC, we’ve (re)found our way to music!!!!!!

so, i don’t really read blogs, (although i do think ron silliman’s is good and bookmarked and i always resolve to read it everyday and learn something, but usually don’t) but, sometimes, after checking how shitty my sales are on amazon i do go look for free downloads and check on people’s music lists, just to get to that next fix, that next great song. and i’ve also got great dealers, all poets.

it seems and not a bit strange that my poetry friends and i do not exchange poems, we exchange music. let’s also not talk copyright/ripping artists off, cause mostly every poor artist deserves all the free shit she can get, and/but mixes are my favorite. talk about confessional!

i personally make a mix two or three times a year. that’s about how long it takes me to find 20 pretty great (mostly new) songs that cohere in a very the-same-way-i-write/structure-my-poems way. most recently chiastic! (certainly some people write poems and make mixes way quicker (they remember to press save!): my friend w.c. (thanks for the fucking cid corman poem!) sends one out each month! and they are great! also great ones by a.l., n.f., d.r., m.z., m.w.,…. very recently jazz from i.s., so i’m still not sure.

what’s with this initial shit?
(happy birthday m.s.!)

who by the way links the recurrent name-dropping theme with today’s (supposed) music one:

worth noting that rappers (obviously the most popular and richest poets working today) have no qualms about shouting out to and calling out others by name, sometimes to fatal effect.

i was gonna (did) say more stuff about jeff tweedy’s stage presence, about cat power apologizing for being shitty, it was all very very smart and very very funny…but…

here we are, finally, and here’s the fix: the playlist from my latest: new year’s mix 200six:
(usually i don’t give/include a playlist)
(also don’t believe in any help/cheating in figuring out lyrics)

1. martha wainwright: “there’s a song” off bloody motherfucking asshole
2. sufjan stevens: track 16 off illinoise
3. rilo kiley: “all the good that won’t come out of us”
4. okkervil river: the saul’s conversion one from river of golden dreams “and i am feeling older/pull off to the shoulder/and wonder with my head in my hands/should i call my wife”
5. leonard cohen: “boogie street” from ten new songs, i think, i think from like 2003. “i’m wanted at/the traffic jam/they’re saving me/a seat”
6. the italian bob dylan (i asked and got in rome last year)
7. “she is the dairy” (ray’s vast basement, i think, from the verse press love mix)
8. “one by one” from kicking televsion (live wilco, lyrics woody guthrie)
9. sparklehorse: “apple bed”: “i wish i had/ a horse’s head,/ a tiger’s heart,/ an apple bed”
10. gillian welch: “o me o my o look at miss ohio” (kary’s song)
11. lucinda live: “i took a bus”
12. white stripes: “i ain’t that lonely yet” from get behind me satan
13. nirvana live: “my girl my girl don’t lie to me….” (i totally loved gus van sant’s last days. his allowing himself (and us) that pace) (elephant, too)
14. vetiver: “without a song”
15. bright eyes live: “true blue”
16. dylan: “song for woody” off no direction home.

(mama, i’m mad at you cause i love you)

reader, let’s face it: that entry is gone!, o.

02.01.06 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Journal, Day Two

so, since this is a poetry blog, i mean “journal”, (and since yesterday’s entry kinda made me freak) here’s catullus’ # 8:
(don’t worry, tomorrow we will talk music) (thursday netflix queue/my children) (and hmmm, what does that leave for friday: ah, yes, sex!) (just kidding!) (hey, it’s catullus, we are headed there already…)

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
et quod uides perisse perditum ducas,
fulsere quondam can didi tibi soles,
cum uentitabas quo pella ducebat
amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.
ibi illa multa tum iocasa fiebant,
quae tu uolebas nec puella nolebat.
fulsere uere candidi tibi soles.
nunc iam illa non uolt: tu quoque inpotens noli,
nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser uiue,
sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.
uale, puella. iam Catullus obdurat,
nec te requiret nec rogabit inuitam.
at tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla.
scelesta, vae te, quaetibi mnaet uita?
quis nunc te adibit? cui uideberis bella?
quem nunc amabis? cuius esse diceris?
quem basiabis? cui labella mordebis?
at tu, Cattule, destinatus obdura.

your latin not so strong? here’s catullus’ # 8 translation carl sesar

you feel bad, Catullus, but quit acting stupid
and face facts. what’s lost is lost.
you had yourself some sunny days for a while,
just going wherever she led you,
no girl ever got the loving you gave her.
a lot of laughs and good times they were too,
anything you wanted she never said no,
yes, those were some sunny days alright.
but she doesn’t want you now, so forget her.
don’t chase her around, making yourself miserable,
make your mind up it’s over, and stick to it.
goodbye my girl. you heard Catullus, he’s had it.
he doesn’t need you, he won’t bother you anymore.
you’ll feel sorry though when nobody wants you.
too bad, bitch! what are you going to do now?
who’ll visit you? who’ll think you’re beautiful?
who will you love? whose girl will they call you?
who else will you kiss and bite on his lips?
but you, Catullus, remember: it’s finished.

and here’s my (way) after catullus
(following up on corman i read he calls his “versions”
lowell calls his “imitations”
i’m calling mine “covers”)

LOOK AT LESBIA NOW!

and look at lesbia now! she’s said farewell
to her face: dark circled
nipples down and dark
she’s even let the hair grow back down there.
right, she’s not a real blonde, and
no one’s knocking at her door anymore.
we all knew it would turn out like this.

o lesbia, daughter of ____and wife of_____and mistress of_____
mother of_____, ha! ceded what? the one so valued
what she had on her once pretty mind
she traded in everyone for that? did you hear
she wouldn’t have a baby with her lover
even if he promised to keep it in a tent out back?
so he left.
have you seen her walking alone thru this black and white town
her pink i-pod playing ryan adams, spoon, rilo kiley,
lucinda, arcade fire, the silver jews, mark mulcahy,
yeah, dylan; sufjan stevens, even,
wearing her usual yellow-pink-blue woolen cap?

let the kindergarten parents talk:
yeah, you know, the divorced one, the “poet”,
the one who wears “the jeans”,
circles under her pink eyes, her young boyfriend
just moved back to new york.

it’s funny, cause although catullus uses the real names of his friends and enemies he changes the name of his (female) lover from clodia to lesbia. isn’t that weird? or maybe you find it endearingly protective. charles martin in a really good book of essays ( i thought) on catullus (using his own translations, only those pieces of which i have seen, and liked as much, though yeah, in a different way, as/than the sesar) (and has anyone read the new translation?) says, in fact, catullus was the first ever to use a pseudonym and that he did it not to protect her, but to make her more individual (in catullus’ times all daughters were named after their father so, for instance, his clodia had two sisters, also named clodia!) and thus, as always, to guarantee the immortality of the beloved. (and thus, as always to guarantee the immortality of… him.)

i recently wrote a poem in which i use a person’s first and last name cause it seemed/s necessary.
is this always a shitty dolphinesque thing to do? (i’m currently (not!) preparing for a three day transgressional post-confessional extravaganza in new york next week…) o kay ryan are you out there? what do you think? well, yeah, not that i really have a dolphin problem, i also wrote a little ditty called “the rainbow dolphin” which is basically a note from my x-husband, but somehow i don’t need to talk to/ask anyone about that.

okay? (we now have three degrees and i’m going to go reheat some old moosemeatloaf at 350.) okay.

01.31.06 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Journal, Day One

dear reader—
dear void—
dear reader devoid
of anything better
to do…

i.e. “who’s there?”
“stand and unfold yourself”

and how did you come/get here? of all the books and all the links and all the walks you could take? well, or, okay, so nobody’s here.

so what. i’m used to it. i’m a working poet!

i guess because i agreed to do this i’ve been thinking (well, actually just walked over to skate at westchester lagoon and thought, i.e. not long enough) about audience/readership, knowing who(m?) (not even that!) and therefore how/what to address, i mean, here, and thinking how mostly it’s a non-issue for me when i write poems, ur, um, ahem, while at the same time realizing/knowing maybe it is really the only issue: how each poem begins (or pre-begins) or ends (or ends in beginning) with a feeling around to find out what needs to be addressed and what to use for it and where it is gonna try and go and where will it does it or doesn’t it stop, which i think is the defining of some kind of “i” and thus, “you”, and thus “i” (yes, i skated in circles!). and how even as hamlet separates himself from the players in his life/on his stage to deliver each of the soliloquies (“i’ll be with you straight”; “go a little before”; “now i am alone” (exeunt all but hamlet) ) he is making himself more available for greater immediacy and intimacy, for/to the “real” “players”: himself and us. “i” and “you”….

did “you” see the aristocrats? it so reminded me of the “poetry world” (and the world of poetry). isn’t it exactly what we are doing? retelling the same existential “joke”, so many versions/variations on the same theme, mostly for the sheer pleasure and pain of it, mostly for ourselves and others employed in the same profession/manner? let the philistines (also just saw the squid and the whale) eavesdrop: they will think it is funny/sad/good/bad laugh cry for all the wrong reasons. (or are they the right ones?) and we will be secretly disclosing great and hideous truths about ourselves and our fellow….poets? so insert “dirty” transgressive aggressive post-neo-confessional disclosure/discourse here, OR DON”T, great attention to wording to timing to breath, OR NOT, bring the usual tricks, mess with the usual tricks, stay inside the joke by leaving the joke, insert subtle allusions/nods to shakespeare, chaucer, herbert, donne, hopkins, dickinson, whitman, moore, wcw, lowell, bishop, plath, creeley, berrigan, and insert your personal poetry friends here. the actual content almost doesn’t matter! voila! (i originally typed: viola!) (and that, too, is part of the joke..) (what isn’t?)
punch line: and, um, what do you call it?
poetry!

which reminds me of my friend w.c. recently saying after attending a marathon reading that he wanted to put all poets on a airplane and crash it while remembering/reciting/(and (re-?maybe just-)minding me) of cid corman’s poem:

There is only
one poem.

This is it.

which reminds me of (“my friend”) harold bloom saying: a strong poet can only read “his” own work.

which leads me to cate’s remark about everyone having to have “a” tradition, and thinking my work based on not really being able to find a one…. but maybe, the anxiety of influence, that there must be a profound and complex act of misreading (but does it have to be of poetry texts?) and that “that reading is likely to be idiosyncratic and it is almost certain to be AMBIVALENT…”

so ambivalent. so thinking poetry does not cannot sustain me.

in response to which my friend m.w. writes, nor him, But then from nowhere I’m knocked down to my knees before the goddess herself. Or a good poet is also a good person, and I’m restored.

what are other sources of poetic “authority”?

also read here:

There are no two things as important to us in life as being threatened and being saved.

and then about bob woodruff, a oldlawschooolmateandcrush of mine, being hit by a roadside bomb in iraq.

my usual anxieties:money/poverty,
…of influence,
my face
PALE.

reader, (admit it!) i’m lost.

thank god poems don’t have deadlines.

it’s zero degrees. or should that be degree? no degrees. none.

dear reader, bright absentee, help me out here. what are you thinking?

what do you want
to say?
to know?

i live at 1403 N Street
& mostly write from here, o.

01.30.06 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS